Investor's Corner
Tesla bears start GoFundMe page for TSLA short accused of harassing Fremont workers
One of Tesla’s fiercest critics who was reportedly forced to cease his online initiatives against the company has returned to start a GoFundMe page for another TSLA bear, who was recently issued a temporary restraining order for stalking, harassing, and endangering a group of employees from the Fremont factory. The fundraiser has been successful so far, with 373 people raising over $81,000 in just one day.
On Friday, the Alameda County Superior Court in CA granted a temporary restraining order against Randeep Hothi, the man behind @skabooshka, a prominent anti-Tesla account on Twitter. Tesla accused Hothi of committing several offenses against the company, including injuring a member of its security personnel, and later, and harassing a group of employees who were filming a demonstration of Navigate on Autopilot in a company-owned Model 3. The temporary restraining order is effective until May 7, when a hearing is set for the noted TSLA bear.
With Hothi’s hearing approaching, the TSLAQ community (a group of individuals aiming for Tesla to fall) has mobilized to raise funds for their fellow detractor. The GoFundMe page was started by Lawrence Fossi, a fierce Tesla critic who wrote and tweeted under the pseudonym Montana Skeptic. Fossi was one of the TSLAQ community’s most active members, at least until he was reportedly forced to cease his online activities after Elon Musk contacted his boss to complain about his actions. Fossi described the goal of the GoFundMe page for Hothi as follows.
I am Lawrence J. Fossi and wrote at Seeking Alpha under the pseudonym of Montana Skeptic. I learned today that Tesla Inc. has obtained an ex parte (only one side represented) temporary restraining order against $TSLAQ member @skabooshka.
What will follow over the next two weeks or so is “discovery” (depositions, written questions) and an evidentiary hearing to determine whether Tesla can obtain a temporary injunction. Tesla alleges @skabooshka is a dangerous person. I believe he is a seeker of truth who has done valuable work and deserves a vigorous and capable defense.
Tesla’s TRO application was triggered by @skabooshka’s effort to determine the true nature of the forthcoming “Investor Autonomy Event”. I believe important First Amendment rights are at issue, and urge you to support his effort.
Funds will be used to pay @skabooshka’s legal expenses in defending against the Tesla legal action, and in bringing any appropriate counterclaims. Any and all excess funds will be donated to a good related cause, with full disclosure about the recipient or recipients, and proof of donation sent to all donors. Many thanks.

Hothi has received an outpouring of support from the Tesla bear community. A look through the donations given to the fundraiser so far shows several known Tesla shorts, including Stanphyl Capital’s Mark Spiegel (who is tapped at times as a source for TSLA insights by mainstream media), @TeslaCharts, and Fossi himself donating significant amounts. In an update to the fundraiser, Fossi pledged that the money raised through the GoFundMe page will strictly be used for Hothi’s legal needs.
While the response to Hothi’s GoFundMe page is quite impressive, it should be noted that Tesla only filed a restraining order against the Tesla bear after he reportedly endangered the lives of three Tesla employees. On April 16, three employees were filming in a Model 3 when Hothi reportedly stalked and harassed them. So aggressive were Hothi’s actions that the Model 3’s crash avoidance systems were activated. Fearing for their safety, one of the Tesla employees in the vehicle promptly called the police to report the incident.
According to Tesla, the April incident was not the first time that Hothi committed acts against the company. Back in February, the TSLA short reportedly struck a security employee with his car when the latter was about to give him a verbal warning for trespassing into the Fremont factory’s grounds. The matter was also reported to the police, who attempted to issue a warning notice of trespass. Unfortunately, the warning was never given since Hothi proved uncooperative in meeting with Fremont police officers.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch
SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.
The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.
Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.
The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.
As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.
Elon Musk
Tesla AI boss reveals how big Optimus is going to get
Tesla’s Optimus chief corrected himself on X, confirming a staggering 10 million robot production target.
Tesla’s Optimus program has a new number attached to it, after Ashok Elluswamy, the executive who has run the humanoid robot program since June 2025, posted a three word correction on X Thursday, “Correction, 10 million robots.”
The line clarifies the long term annual capacity Tesla is building toward its planned second Optimus production line at Gigafactory Texas, a figure Musk has cited repeatedly since last year’s shareholder meeting.
The scale is worth noting, because ten million robots a year would mean Tesla building more units annually than most countries sell in new cars. Tesla has framed this as a second line, not the first. The buildout is happening in two phases: a roughly one million unit per year line inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, installed on the floor space vacated when Model S and Model X production ended earlier this year, and a much larger dedicated facility under construction at Giga Texas that broke ground on its first steel structure in May. That Texas facility is the one Elluswamy’s correction refers to, and is expected to reach volume production sometime in 2027.
Correction, 10 million robots https://t.co/0z4nyQNTzp
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) July 30, 2026
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Elluswamy took over Optimus from Milan Kovac last summer and has spent the months since talking up the program’s trajectory. Elon Musk has also floated the ten million figure at Tesla’s 2025 shareholder meeting.
Ending Model S and Model X production to make room for the first Optimus line was one of the more consequential manufacturing decisions in the company’s recent history, retiring two flagship vehicles in favor of a robot that has yet to enter mass production. Musk has previously estimated per unit production costs at $20,000 to $25,000 once Tesla reaches a million units a year, though he hasn’t said what that cost looks like at ten times the volume.
Elon Musk
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.

